]]>http://zones-info.com/barcode-software/feed/0IT changes on the horizonhttp://zones-info.com/it-changes-on-the-horizon/
http://zones-info.com/it-changes-on-the-horizon/#commentsWed, 06 Nov 2013 03:42:54 +0000http://jdtools.ca/zones-info/?p=11IT operation has been focusing for years on hardware and cutting cost more recently. But I think they are focusing too much on these two and forget the new way applications developers think about hardware. They care much less than they used to be with virtualisation.

The new trend of using Cloud services outside their facilities to have ease of scaling and deployment. Building a “true” internal Cloud infrastructure requires sets of expertise and experience that very few have. Here are some aspect required by new applications developers:

Leverage new development platforms (no legacy here)

Grid or network database platforms (not centralized)

Scalable servers, network and storage hardware (elastic)

Fault tolerance at software layer rather than just hardware (Disaster Recovery)

Ease and self management (no IT involvement)

PaaS or IaaS and moving to PaaS in the future

It is not because you’ve installed new Cloud infrastructure that you have a Cloud It is more than hardware. In fact it is mostly software. Dev-Ops, automation and monitoring are the new buzz word in Cloud. To achieve what Amazon, Google and Facebook are doing here are few principal point to do on hardware and software side:

Reduce your number of products and vendors (2 max if possible)

Standardize your hardware platform by reducing the number of components and vendors

Standardize storage platform (a mix of NAS and Block storage)

Standardize your service offering and avoid exceptions as much as possible

Storage industry will “not” fix its market before its get rely involved with application developers. Moving their data from one storage type to another (Flash, SAS, SATA, tape) without warning is a suicide way for the applications (Tiering and archive). No one in storage industry take developers seriously. Modern and recent Cloud applications developers are not storage friendly because they are not “trained” on how to deal with it.

Here is my popular comments on that. (my trademark)
The probability to read a few centuries old pictogram on the pyramid in few hundred years is higher than reading today video file in a few decade. Too many changes and standards will occurs making my video file unusable by the new technologies or applications. There is a good chance it will be lost by simply by not been backing up or the SAaS internet service went bankrupt or acquired.

We probably loose more highly valuable data “daily” in IT than the entire papers and books lost when the Alexandria Library burned.